The Cookbook Collector

by Allegra Goodman (Dial; $26)

Goodman’s charming reworking of “Sense and Sensibility” follows two sisters—Emily, the C.E.O. of a promising data-storage startup in Silicon Valley, in the late-nineties, and Jess, a tree-hugging vegan who meanders through graduate school at Berkeley while moonlighting at an antiquarian bookstore. There she and her grumpy boss, George, an old-school Microsoft millionaire, stumble into “a bibliophile’s Louisiana Purchase,” the rare cookbook collection of an eccentric lichenologist. Goodman ably captures the giddy atmosphere of the dot-com bubble and takes the parabola of the market as the geometry of all desire: when the Nasdaq swoons, so does Jess for George. If Goodman’s story occasionally overreaches—it has too many ingredients and relies a lot on coincidence and revelation—it remains wry, astute, and gratifying. ♦

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